This item represents a collection of 13,480,000 tweet IDs that mentioned 'ferguson' from 2014-08-10 to 2014-08-27 and 15,080,078 tweet IDs that mention "ferguson" between 2014-11-11 and 2014-12-08.
The first set includes tweets for the two week period after the shooting of Michael Brown, and the second range includes tweets around the grand jury's decision not to indict police officer Darren Wilson which was announced on 2014-11-24.
The first set of tweets were collected by Ed Summers at the University of Maryland and the second was a collaboration between Molly Loyd, Gregory Coleman, Kimberly Lamke, Benjamin Sugar and Ed Summers.
At the time of writing (January 7th, 2015) Twitter's Terms of Service do not allow bulk distribution of the raw JSON data for tweets. However they do allow the tweet IDs to be shared. You can use this data in combination with their data API to "hydrate" the IDs to get the original data. A tool like
twarc can be used to hydrate them automatically.
Note: We did not seek consent from the thousands of users who posted their public content on the Web. If you do hydrate the dataset and use it in your research we do ask that you consider their rights as content creators, especially with regard to their privacy.